March 28, 2006
March 28, 2006 >> 10:21:11 AM
Christians ARE Crazy!
Ripped from the headlines –
Further Proof that Christians are Crazy!
I was right!
Years ago, when I was a savvy sixteen year old with an IQ somewhere around 1000
(and not hereditary - my parents at that time had IQs of 12 and 13,
respectively), I tried to tell everyone that Christianity was ridiculous and
that to believe in some unseen God who raised people from the dead was a clear
sign of lunacy. If Paul could claim to have been a “Jew among Jews” then I was
an “atheist among atheists”.
While I was
clearly in error about God’s existence and the notion of resurrection, I was
spot-on about the insanity of believers!
By now, I
suspect that all of Christendom is aware of the harrowing story of Abdul
Rahman, who, until yesterday, was under threat of execution in
He may have
saved himself the trouble if he would have kept a lower profile. He didn’t and
the you-know-what hit the fan when he was noticed not praying with other
Muslims and reading a Bible. His admission of having become a Christian also
irritated his neighbors, who, seeking to protect God’s honor, insisted Rahman
have his neck stretched.
I may be
going out on a limb here, but I think they overreacted. As far as I can tell,
God doesn’t need our help protecting his honor.
For a while,
things looked bleak for our Afghan brother... Until they decided that he’s as
crazy as a bedbug. Rahman’s family petitioned the Afghan Supreme Court to
dismiss his case because he suffered from mental illness. The judge in the case
expressed considerable doubt that he was fit to stand trial and that Rahman
seemed “disturbed” (facing a lynching ... who wouldn’t be “disturbed”). Family,
judge, and prosecutors also attest to his having heard voices in his head.
For
diplomatic and humanitarian reasons, all of these folk had been frantically
searching for a way to let Rahman off without losing his head, and it appears
that they settled on an interesting ploy. Indeed, to convert to Christianity is
just nuts. To do so proves one’s inability to function rationally. He had
become foolishness to others.
If Abdul
Rahman does in fact suffer from schizophrenia or some other mental illness,
then he has my heartfelt sympathy and prayers for his healing. However, his statements
about his faith do not sound deranged to me...
...but then I
am a crazy, lunatic Christian too!
February 08, 2006
February 08, 2006 >> 9:15:00 AM
work, work, work, work, work, work, work, ...
As we return to the work of preparation for ministry - be it pastoral, counseling, teaching, youth work, education, or any number of other vocational callings - there is at once eager anticipation of what lies ahead... and (now that most of us have received our syllabi and picked up our stacks of texts from the bookstore) some dread at what lies ahead. With a whopping 3 hours left of my MDiv to complete this spring, I am strongly tempted to throttle back and cruise the rest of the way. It’s a little tough to get up the enthusiasm to do more than just skim the required readings and scribble off more than what just gets by. Praise the Lord for the cloud of witnesses, one or two of which will not let me be so mediocre.
In his book Life Together, Deitrich Bonhoeffer a helpful observation about work that has shown me a more excellent way. He insightfully highlights the connection between prayer and work when he says,
...the unity of prayer and work, the unity of
the day is discovered; for to find, back of the “it” of the day’s work, the
“Thou” which is God, is what Paul calls “praying without ceasing”. Thus the
prayer of the Christian reaches beyond the set time and extends to the heart of
his work. It includes the whole day, and in doing so, it does not hinder the
work; it promotes it, affirms it, and lends it meaning and joy. Thus every
word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes prayer; not in the
unreal sense of turning away from the task that must be done, but in a real
breaking through the hard “it” to the gracious Thou. (70-71)
Here, Bonhoeffer is telling us a couple important things. First, he is affirming the sacredness and value of work, be it in the academy, office, field, store, factory floor, or wherever else people labor (he works this point a few pages earlier). Second, prayer, while it is something we do from time to time, is more importantly a state of being. He has wrestled with Paul’s “praying without ceasing” and had come to the reasonable conclusion that one who does so is not just spending the day babbling at God. Rather, to ceaselessly pray is to be in an attitude of communion and communication with God in the Spirit that is vital and vibrant yet so integral to one’s being that words are superfluous.
Putting these together, Bonhoeffer concludes that work becomes meaningful and joyful because it is done in the constant presence of God, who by his presence affirms our labor. Indeed, behind the thing that we see and do as task, service, or product – the “it” – is the “Thou” of God, the Creator of all that is, be it thing or process.
God’s presence elevates what we are often tempted to consider insignificant, mundane, or even annoying in our daily labor to gracious gift and blessing (yes... even tedious reading and languages work, research and reflection papers, and exams).
Of course, for Bonoeffer there is no cheap grace. We meet the gift and blessing of work with our best effort, since the work itself entered into prayerfully “becomes a remedy against the indolence and sloth of the flesh” (70).
Be in prayer
and do good work.
January 08, 2006
January 08, 2006 >> 3:02:55 PM
Epiphany and Our Problem with Authority
“Now after Jesus was born ... wise men from the east came ... and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him.” (Mt 2:1,2,11).
“... the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb” (Rev 5:8)
How do we preach this stuff in a culture that has a problem with authority? Or, put another way, how do we communicate these responses to lordship to a society that strenuously rejects the notion of kingship and holds the rights of the individual to be the greatest of inviolable values?
As Christians (and worse yet, as indoctrinated seminary academics) we talk a lot about the lordship of Jesus Christ. But I wonder how many of us have a clue as to what this means outside of being an abstract political concept. Those who have lived under totalitarian regimes, where to even openly question the “king” might be suicidal (or at least very bad for business), do have a clue. Unfortunately for the rest of us, particularly here in America, our cherished freedom of the individual has left us so disassociated from the understanding of the concrete reality of “kingship”, that were we to be confronted by Jesus today, I suspect few, if any would fall down and worship him with the same deference of the wise men and the heavenly court. We simply will not be driven to our knees for anyone just because we have entered his or her presence.
We can try to preach sovereign kingship by allusion to historical and fictional kings that have ruled over kingdoms elsewhere (but not here), but I wonder if trying to do so only refines the abstraction of “kingship” and, more importantly, misses the reality. Let me suggest something more simple and, I dare say, biblical.
Let’s try a thought experiment... Imagine yourself standing on the railroad track just east of campus and positioned squarely between the rails. Stay put until a train comes. Face the train, put out your hands to stop it, and shout it down like you might a charging dog. Come on, you're in America... we don’t need no stinkin’ badges and don’t take being pushed around by anyone. Just stop the train...
If you carry through with your imagined attempt to stop the train, then you should find yourself imaginatively flattened against the front of the lead engine like a bug against a windshield. Not a pretty sight ... but it makes the point that a moving train is, as far as the individual standing between the rails is concerned, an infinitely powerful and irresistible force.
I think that this is roughly how we find God when we come into God’s presence. The Lamb is so infinitely mighty and irresistible that falling down before him is not a choice as much as a natural reaction to his presence. The deference we are meant to show God, not only falling down and worshiping but also obedience and love, are due God because of who God is more than for any other reason. It’s all well and good that we thank and praise God for our cruciform salvation, but God did not save us to buy our worship. We worship, submit, and obey because God is the Great I AM.
Of course, there are plenty of folk who resist. But it’s like resisting gravity. One might be able to jump or fly for a while, but eventually gravity will win out. And if one somehow manages to reject the concept of gravity and disbelieve in it, all s/he has done is to embrace a delusion.
If you haven’t fallen down before the Lamb, then your delusion needs a reality check. If you think you can resist the Lordship of Jesus Christ, then I bet you think you can stop a train with your bare hands, too.
December 10, 2005
December 10, 2005 >> 12:18:13 PM
Let Them Do the Right Thing Already!
To all protesters besieging Wal-Mart, Target, and their capitalistic, free-market, consumeristic brethren:
Please leave them alone! - They are doing the RIGHT thing!
Yes - by suppressing, banning, and eschewing "Christmas" from their premises, either by neutral "holiday" advertising and store displays or the purging of Santas, these businesses are, through their deeds, conveying a more potent message about Christmas than many of our churches. Indeed, without knowing it, they are doing great work to spread Scriptural holiness throughout the land.
While we, in our churches, hang our greens, argue over when it's okay to sing Christmas carols (isn't it liturgically improper during Advent), display charming and historically imaginative live nativities, sing lessons and carols (again), and generally strive to present a "Christmas" that is equal parts Charles Dickens, Norman Rockwell, and medieval mystery play, ...
... the "heathen" politically-correct retailers are acting to decouple our Holy Lord Jesus' humble birth from a gaudy and idolatrous possession-centered consumer culture. For all the angst over Christmas consumerism we good religious folk experience, we seem generally incapable of meaningfully dealing with our concerns while the powers and principalities of consumer culture are actually doing something to bring about positive change. While we Christians stress out arranging our holiday parties, doing our decorating (which often involves the Faustian decision of killing a living tree or putting up one made of irreplaceable petroleum products), feeling bad because we are once again late sending card, and buying all the right stuff for everyone in our family, the profit-worshiping minions of evil are implicitly doing far more to honor the God Incarnate who came not to increase investment returns on Wall Street but to proclaim the good news to the poor, liberty to the captives and oppressed, and recovery of sight to the blind. By inviting "Christ" out of their dens of iniquity, retailers are making the separation of sacred and profane that we good Christians seem too often unwilling to recognize.
The Bethlehem stable, bereft of lights, tinsel, Santa, elves, reindeer, and all manner of product placements was far more beautiful and sublime than all the trappings church and culture have over the centuries layered onto the event of our Lord's Incarnation. Unlike the mad rush of last-minute frenzy we are all too familiar with every year, time and space stopped - if for only just a moment - when everything in all Creation changed on that otherwise mundane night two millennia ago when God came to be amongst us.
If we are going to recreate a special moment every year, that should be the one.
- May you and those you love have a blessed Christmas filled with shalom -
November 28, 2005
November 28, 2005 >> 8:00:00 AM
Ingrates "Я" Us
Like so many other times that I have “awakened” to see the world as it really is, rather than as a construct of our collective consumer-driven fantasy, the Thanksgiving “event” that we rehearse each year now appears to me as a grand non-sequitor. Like other holidays, this one has been reduced to an obligation to visit family (whom we should probably be seeing more frequently anyway), a rich-food binge that we give ourselves carte-blanche to consume, and an excuse to lay about the house doing nothing very useful. While I endorse these activities (all, including visiting family, in moderation of course), and have become a master of the latter two, it does strike me that we “do” Thanksgiving in almost the same way we “do” Christmas and Easter (and Memorial Day, Labor Day, and July 4th). These have become functionally interchangeable feast days for many of us in America.
All platitudes about “The Reason for the Season” aside, the implications of having a series of holidays that look they were all hatched from the same egg is a bit troubling, particularly given what these events intend to celebrate. Since it’s so easy to tear apart our cultural abuse of Christmas and Easter, I’ll leave those alone (for now). Thanksgiving, though, is a bit more difficult to sort out.
It seems natural to rejoice in plenty and prosperity by ... well ... indulging in it and enjoying the fruits of our good fortune. Indeed, it seems hypocritical, or at least inconsistent, to enjoy something and eschew it at the same time. But I suspect we have crossed a line somewhere and wallow in our prosperity rather than sincerely celebrate it in a way that honors its source. Fed ‘n’ happy Christians lolling in front of billboard-sized flat-panel TVs shouting epithets at the enemy football team (if a Lion’s fan like me, at my own team) or at the blind-as-a-bat referees, are obviously remiss if that is the extent to which the God, the Creator and Sustainer of all good things, is shown gratitude. Yet even secular folk, who know how to give good things, are just as remiss when they likewise treat prosperity as an entitlement, enjoying its benefits without feeling sincere thankfulness for them.
Is being
materially blessed a soul-killer? Are we trapped by the paradox that we are
given a world full of good things yet we corrupt ourselves by enjoying them? While
not a “prosperity gospel” guy, I don’t think so. For one thing, it seems
ungracious and a bit arrogant to reject what God has so richly given, a bit
like the eccentric aunt who opens your Christmas present and, instead of
returning a hearty “thank you!”, exclaims “Oh No! I can’t take this!”. For
another, enjoying the goods of this world is part of who we are created to be.
It all circles back to the fundamental question every person, family, clan, tribe, and nation must ask themselves: “Who is my/our God?”. If it is the goods of prosperity, the idea of prosperity, or (more crassly) our own stomachs, then we have indeed set up idols of wood, stone, silver, and gold for ourselves to worship, and it is difficult to truly be thankful for what we have received without indulgence. However, if our god is God, the Lord of Creation, the Lord of all Good Things that we are given on loan, then our gratitude has a clear target and we have a clear calling to be responsible with the prosperity we have received, both to steward it wisely and to share it generously.
For this I do thank the Lord our God!
October 28, 2005
October 28, 2005 >> 12:01:24 AM
Be Ye Not Stuck In A Rut
Have you ever been on the road for a few hours, halfway to wherever it is your going, when you get this slightly uneasy feeling that you have forgotten something, like your toothbrush, or to let the cat out of the house, or to turn off the toaster oven*, yet you know you’ve gone too far to turn back? That’s a bit of what it feels like right now.
...Mid-term
...Mid-life
...Mid-way between Christ’s ascension and his return
This “middle” time is a period when things fall into a comfortable (or at least predictable) rhythm, when we are no longer “newbees” but more seasoned veterans, and when we are at the peak of our performance and potential. It is also a time we get used to a routine the way one becomes velocitized and almost hypnotized behind the wheel on a long drive, a time when the novelty of the journey, so exciting at the start, has worn down to a smooth “same-old-same-old”, and a time when we’ve become so used to the journey that the destination seems too far off to think about right now.
It is a truly dangerous time of temptation. As students we let up a bit, ostensibly taking a breather from mid-terms, when we should be beginning preparations for end of term projects and exams. We middle-aged folk are lured by comfortable routine to a plateau where personal growth stops as we “mature” and become so much more sensibly risk-averse than we were in our impetuous and adventure-loving youth. As the body of Christ we are seduced into accepting a staid and insular routine of 19th century Sunday morning worship, a steady diet of “tastes-great-less-filling” praise and worship time, and maybe a hip youth program one evening a week, and believing this to be the effectual continuation of Jesus Christ’s ministry in the world. It’s been a long time since those heady days of the early church, hot and energized from the powerful experiences of Christ’s resurrection and the baptism of the Spirit at Pentecost, and the Eschaton seems no nearer now than it was then. Indeed, the real danger of these middle times is a mix of boredom and hubris.
With the alternative of upending the status quo coming into view someone will inevitably claim that things are going just fine, so “if it ain’t broke... don’t fix it”. The problem with this view though, is that what is “going just fine” is almost always the safe, predicable routine that has been mastered. The sense of accomplishment at being able to successfully repeat what has been done a myriad of times blinds one to the deficiencies in what is happening within that routine. It’s like feeling successful because you worked another day at the same job you’ve done for years, ate another from-freezer-to-microwave-to-plate dinner and managed to fit in another four or five hours of ganglia-stimulating television, all while ignoring the atrophy setting into both body and mind.
Christianity was never meant to be a safe and predictable routine. The creation of the universe, the growing of God’s people Israel, the apex of creation in Jesus Christ who overcomes creaturely limitation, the new heart given to every believer by the ever renewing and re-creating power of the Holy Spirit, and the new Jerusalem of the Eschaton are all evidences of a God who refuses to settle into a routine or hold to a status quo. This is a God who is ever doing a new thing, making all things new, and adapting Providence to the changing shape of lives and relationships. From this context, it seems like either extreme fearfulness or arrogant presumption to establish a safe and predictable rhythm and establish a status quo as if to say, “I’ve got it right so why change?”.
God never said that the time of waiting should be a time of stagnation and boredom, far from the excitement of both Christ’s glorification and triumphant return. To prepare the way of the Lord and the land for the Kingdom means more than just keeping the grass mowed once a week. The world that we steward for God needs more work than that.
This is the “middle-time” - but it is no time to settle into mediocre routine. If God can do a new thing every day then, as creations in His image, so can we.
October 18, 2005
October 18, 2005 >> 10:22:00 PM
An Old Dog Learns a Lesson About Stewardship
Ah... deadlines... appologies for being a bit late with this...
Friday, while cruising I-75 on my way back to Michigan and just north of Lima, OH, traffic was stopped and I knew I was in for a wait when the truck drivers nearby shut off their engines. With nothing else to do, I took action ... and started reading the next assignment for Dr. Thobaban. One hour later, folks started anxiously stepping out of their cars to look up the road, as if doing so might turn the highway-disabling problem into a mirage that might vaporize under their gaze. Mildly panicked, some bolted across the shallow valley of the grassy median, threatening to cause accidents on the southbound side of the road as they tried to merge into 80mph traffic from the side of the road. I, on the other hand, was feeling only a little edgy, possibly more as a result of what I was reading: Conrad’s, “Heart of Darkness” (tip: don not read this book while in a chaotic and stressful situation, it is not helpfully calming).
After we started moving again, but only at parade speed, the problem became evident a couple of miles father on. Just loaded on a flat-bed tow-truck was the remains of a small car that looked like a psychotic Jolly Green Giant had picked it up and wrung it like a wet washcloth. I could feel my stomach knot up before I could get my head around the astronomically slim chance than anyone in the car could have survived. A thousand feet further up the road was a semi with its big trailer box sitting flat on the ground, wheels and carriage in pieces scattered all over the sides of the road. Apparently the car had somehow got caught under the semi and was rolled and crumpled.
After bumbling through a reflexive prayer for all involved, it struck me how fast and unpredictably our lives can ... simply ... without fanfare, celebration, lamentations or well-wishes ... just end. Whatever is still on the calendar ... whatever has yet to be finished ... whatever has been put off until later ... is done.
There is a valid logic to living with gusto while one has the chance. Of course, taken to an extreme this sort of ethos leads to routinely stupid and self-destructive behavior. Like so many things in life, the pages in the instruction manual that deal with “living life to the fullest without hurting yourself or anyone else” are missing. Praise the Lord that we have Scripture and the example of Jesus to give us a clue.
Our lives, like everything else in Creation, do not belong to us but to God. We are consecrated stewards of that bit of Creation we see as ourselves – body, mind, and soul – and our stewardship has at least these three aspects:
(1) Stewardship of one’s self. We are called to care for ourselves because we do belong to God. Self-destructive, careless behavior misuses that which does not belong to us, and therefore offends the Creator to whom we belong. As good stewards of ourselves we are called to see to our own health (physical, emotional, and spiritual) and, hardest to manage for busy seminary students and pastors, to take time to rest (the body, mind, and emotions) and to play.
(2) Stewardship of one’s time. Our time in this earthly life is finite. Oddly enough, we often act as if this were not the case, putting off what we should be doing, saying, or being until “tomorrow”, which may never come. To waste time misuses the resource of time that God has let us borrow, thus offending the giver (bye the way, rest is not waste, most television though...?).
(3) Stewardship of one’s presence. We belong to God but are given to each other. It is each person’s calling to give of his or her presence to family and friends, our faith communities, and especially to God. If the Spirit is telling you to be with someone, then do it... now. You may not get another chance.
I realize how difficult it can be when the work piles up and demands call from all directions. It’s that time of the semester when due dates for big projects loom menacingly above the horizon and assignments arrive at the door in a dump-truck. The sensible thing to do is to stay nose-to-the-ground and just plow through it all... At least I did until I started thinking about all the life I am missing in the process. Yes, we are called to a high standard of responsibility and excellence (that is also an aspect of our stewardship), but taking a break now and then to take care of ourselves and be a gift to others is also a holy calling.
October 08, 2005
October 08, 2005 >> 8:48:31 AM
An Old Dog Unlearns and Old Trick
Common wisdom, that body of knowledge of what “is”, tells us that people become set in their ways as they grow older. Because old folk become so stodgy and stubborn, our society’s innovators and tastemakers consider anyone over thirty too inflexible to offer anything fresh and new (if you don’t believe age discrimination exists then wait a few years... you will). Ironically though, all it takes to become set in one’s ways is practice. The more you do or think of something a particular way, the more embedded that way becomes.
I became stodgy and set in my ways at about ... oh... twenty-five years of age. No, I didn’t suddenly take a liking to easy-listening music, trade my sports car for a big four-door sedan with cheesy wood-grain paneling on the sides, begin wearing tweedy cardigans, complain incessantly about taxes and sciatica, or join the Republican party (I am a generation before the rise of the “Young Republican” ... a generation who remembers Nixon in all his inglory). Rather, I came into my own as a problem solver par excellence.
For twenty years, prior to coming to campus at ATS, I was one of that most egotistical of species: the computer software developer. As a practice, software development does only two things – (a) develops new solutions to problems, and (b) fixes old solutions to problems (i.e. fixes bugs). Every computer program ever written, no matter how trivial or insipid the application, solves what someone believes to be a problem. So, when I became adept at programming, I became a problem solver of mythic proportion (as all programmers believe they are). Thus, I could code over, around, or through any problem thrown at me, and (in the tradition of programmers throughout the universe) my solutions were always the best ones.
“Techies” are merely talented at using the work of others in effective ways – I was a true Cyber-Cowboy of the Digital Range, a rugged individualist, a sort of Marlboro Man with a mouse, who could handle things in the Wild West of Cyberspace.
If you want to knock the Marlboro Man off his horse and make him feel like he hasn’t a clue, then send him to seminary and make him do some pastoral ministry. This is both a humbling and enlightening experience in several ways. First, there are no problem solving skills that help one who does not speed read to deal gracefully with the roughly 3000 or so pages of reading required in a semester at a weekly rate that quickly becomes barely manageable. And, of course, there are the papers to be written at a rate that, taking the seminary as a whole, likely decimates a good size pine forest every year.
Secondly, pastoral ministry gives the problem solver par excellence a great venue to crash and burn. Although pastors do their most intense ministry with persons who have nasty problems, I learned (like I usually do – the hard way) by experience that pastoral ministry is not about solving people’s problems. It’s not even about facilitating parishioners’ own problem solving abilities. Focusing on another person’s problems not only puts one into a situation in which he or she has no control (the life of the other person), but is likely to communicate that that person is far less important and interesting than his or her problem. In fact, to take on another person’s problem, assuming that we can make a solution is arrogant presumption and probably idolatry of self. People’s problems do not belong to us, they belong to God who truly is The Problem Solver Par Excellence. Our job is to be present, love, respect, preserve dignity, do justice, witness to the God to whom we belong, and to do whatever else we are led to do by the Holy Spirit. They happy side-effect, should it happen, is that problems get solved... but not because we solved them on our own.
This is a perspective that distinguishes Christians from the rest of the world. We know we are limited and distorted by sin so that we need God’s help in all things. It’s when we forget this and strike out on our own that the train comes off the rails. Yet it is really hard in our culture to be insufficient and dependent. We tend to not only want to do it all ourselves, but do it bigger and better than the folk down the street (whether this applies to the megachurch I leave the reader to decide). It’s all too easy to make wooden gods out of self-sufficiency, independence, and effectiveness wrapped in a gilding of “excellence”.
This old dog is learning, albeit slowly, how not to problem-solve, but to give problems to God and then submit to the guidance of the Holy Spirit who does give us sufficient strength for the day.
September 28, 2005
September 28, 2005 >> 8:35:56 AM
An Old Dog Among The Pups
A true benefit of coming to know one’s own sin is that personal vanity becomes so much nonsense. Such it is coming to grips with age. While many like to regard “middle age” as somewhere between 50 and 70 years of age (which implies that they expect to live anywhere from 100 to 140 years), I am quite content to admit that at 44 I am middle-aged. Of course, mid-40s for an American male is considered by many the prime of life. Family life is settled, earning potential is at its peak, the body is still vigorous (albeit a bit creaky), self-confidence is high, identity is firmly established, and some of us still have our natural hair (if not necessarily our original hair color)
Middle age is just the time to start-over again... full-stop.
It has become commonplace, if not almost trite, that some folk will crest the mountain of their lives, and in that rarefied atmosphere see themselves with a new clarity previously unknown and then begin to question their purpose and direction. Whether feeling a need to finally do something “meaningful” (as if nothing they have done has meant anything of value) or a sense of “calling” to do something new, they chuck the baggage of a lifetime over one side of the precipice and take a flying leap off the other at a tangent to the course they had been treading... And land in seminary. Hence my expectation, upon arriving on campus in Wilmore last fall, that ATS would be populated almost exclusively by graying, balding, bifocal wearing, mostly married, and slightly pudgy middle-age students.
Most of my experiences in life have managed to evade even my most conservative expectations, so it was temporary insanity that led me to expect anything in particular about this place.
What I found was a campus largely peopled by kids a generation younger than I who, had I any children might be their contemporaries. There are, of course, more than a few of us old-folks hobbling around, but most are married and live off campus, if not in another town where they currently pastor. As it is, I suspect that I am the oldest guy living in Grice right now, and it feels a bit odd being back in a dorm after decades (that’s a lifetime for you youngins) away from communal living among the cinder blocks. The transition would be easier if the tag group, that place where the first and often most durable seminary social networks are established, in which I was placed was composed of people who weren’t all living off campus, except for me. I suppose I could insinuate myself into one or another of the many happy social groupings that abound here, but I do not like to step in where I have not been invited.
The point of this isn’t to whine about not having much of a social life, but rather to point out that the awkward social situation is one of a number of things that makes for a fairly wrenching mid-life adjustment when everything is dropped to attend seminary. Although the “mid-life seminarian” has become stereotypical in our culture, the experience of being called to ministry in mid-life is hardly one that can be cheapened or generalized. It is difficult, anxiety inducing, lonely, yet liberating, stimulating, challenging and fulfilling. I cannot think of anything else I would rather be doing right now. Maybe more importantly, I am growing spiritually at a rate that I had not believed possible. I feel the hand of God on me as I go about this sacred task of preparation for ministry. I pray that all who attend here may come to feel this way.
For a few essays at least, I feel called to reflect on this change-at-mid-life experience here in Wilmore. Those who have been this far up the hill with me will maybe hear echoes of thoughts and feelings they already know. Those younger folk who have recently left college (and who have not yet made such a jarring life-reorientation), might learn something new about their more “seasoned” colleagues.
...And I promise to lighten up a bit ... I had a little angst to slug through...
Shalom (and I mean that in its fullest sense)...
...mark
